If there is one eternal truth of politics, it is that there are always a dozen good reasons for doing nothing.

I move my lips when I read -- I'm painfully slow -- so I like really good English.

It's easy to forget what intelligence consists of: luck and speculation. Here and there a windfall, here and there a scoop.

But there is a big difference in working for the West and working for a totalitarian state.

I worked for MI6 in the Sixties, during the great witch-hunts, when the shared paranoia of the Cold War gripped the services.

Treason is very much a matter of habit, Smiley decided.

When it comes to recruiting people for the secret world, what the recruiters are looking for is pretty much what I had. I was unanchored, looking for an institution to look after me. I had a bit of larceny. I understood larceny. I understood the natural criminality in people - because it was - it was all around me. And I have no doubt there was a chunk of it inside me too. Once I found that identity, it took root in me. It exactly - it gelled with the world that I'd known in the past.